Back in January we launched our free benchmarking tool for key stage 4. So far it has been used to analyse the results of 23% of state mainstream secondary and all-through schools. We’ve now updated the tool to incorporate yesterday’s release of provisional 2016 data, so you can see your school’s performance in a national context against the new headline measures.

The 4 new headline measures are: Attainment 8, Progress 8, % achieving A*-C including English & Maths and % achieving the Ebacc. The updated front page of our tool now includes the most recent results for all of these measures. Interestingly, the DfE's provisional data release also included 5+ A*-C including English & Maths, even though it’s no longer a headline measure. Despite it clinging on for dear life, we have somehow managed to resist the temptation to include it in our tool (and if the sarcasm doesn’t come through in that statement, you can read about all of our performance measure pontificating in a previous blog).

Given that this is just provisional data, there are a few points to note about its use in the tool and about the data itself:

The provisional data release doesn’t include the full suite of performance measures and breakdowns. It is therefore not possible to update the whole of the tool. We’ve updated a slimmed down front page to incorporate the newly-released data, but removed the tabs that dive down into trend and group analysis. The tool will be updated to once again include these more detailed views as soon as the full dataset is available in January 2017.

Please note that this data is provisional. For many schools the results won’t change significantly (or at all) between now and the final release, but please bear in mind that provisional data does not take account of things such as late results and remarks so your results may change when we update for the final data release in January.

As ever we are keen for your thoughts and feedback. Whether you love it or hate it, feel enlightened or confused, we want to know what you think. Please email rachel@assembly.education to share your feedback.